Abstract

We investigate the effects of fragmentation in equity trading on the quality of the trading outcomes, specifically volatility, liquidity and volume. We use panel regression methods on a weekly dataset following the FTSE350 stocks over the period 2008-2011, which provides a lot of cross-sectional and time series variation in fragmentation. This period coincided with a great deal of turbulence in the UK equity markets which had multiple causes that need to be controlled for. To achieve this, we use a version of the common correlated effects estimator (Pesaran, 2006). One finding is that volatility is lower in a fragmented market when compared to a monopoly. Trading volume at the London Stock Exchange is lower too, but global trading volume is higher if order flow is fragmented across multiple venues. When separating overall fragmentation into visible fragmentation and dark reading, we find that the decline in LSE volume can be attributed to visible fragmentation, while the increase in global volume is due to dark trading.

NEP fields

Statistics

Corrections

All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ifs:cemmap:42/13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.